These are not the words one expects to hear from the mouth of a Canadian filmmaker, especially not Bruce Sweeney, the Vancouver director of Dirty, Excited, Live Bait, American Venus and Last Wedding — movies that veered into the oncoming lane of sexual taboo, where things like premature ejaculation and masochistic fantasy weave in and out of mainstream traffic.

There are no such hazards in The Crimes of Mike Recket, Sweeney’s latest feature that makes its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival this week alongside new work from other Canadian commodities, including Deepa Mehta (Midnight’s Children), Xavier Dolan (Laurence Anyways), Denis Cote (Bestiaire), Sudz Sutherland (Home Again) and Sarah Polley’s revealing family documentary, Stories We Tell.

Sweeney says he was looking for a change, not just for the sake of his own creative muses, but his own survival as an artist.

Funding films becomes more difficult every year as budgets shrivel, and as government agencies put the emphasis on commerce, the once potent tradition of auteur-driven Canadian film is starting to sag, replaced by shades of Hollywood genre.

“When push comes to shove, I usually lie down,” says Sweeney. “But everyone knows things are pretty depressing (in Canadian film) as a whole. Projects that used to be greenlit aren’t going forward anymore. Telefilm moved to a centralist model, so the decisions are made by a central committee and things that used to be possible at the regional level aren’t anymore.”

Sweeney points to The Crimes of Mike Recket as an example of how far he’s willing to go in order to remain a voice in the woods: “I’d say this is a neo-noir,” he says. “But not in any conventional sense. I’ve tried to subvert genre. It’s the story of how one mistake leads to the next — which is very noir — but there is no typical femme fatale.”

The Crimes of Mike Recket marks Sweeney’s sixth film premiere at Canada’s most prestigious film event, which kicks off Thursday with a gala screening of Looper — a science-fiction story about bending time lines starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt.

As one of about 20 feature directors joining the ranks of 44 short film directors, Sweeney says he’s always happy to come east in September because it’s a huge honour that puts you in front of the world.

Certainly for first-time feature directors such as Igor Drljaca and Kazik Radwanski, here with Krivina and Tower respectively, the thrill of TIFF-ing for the first time outweighs any sense of dread about the future.

“I love the Canadian tradition. It comes from a documentary background and I think we shot my movie a lot like a documentary — we had no shooting script. So it was unconventional,” says Radwanski of Tower, the story of a man lost in existential space.

“It’s exciting to have the movie here,” says Radwanski. “But it also just had its world premiere at Locarno, and I think our movies play well to European audiences, too.”

Indeed, many filmmakers would prefer to see Canada emulate any other model than Hollywood genre — if only because the Americans do genre better than anyone else.

“I believe in genre-less filmmaking,” says Drljaca, who moved to Canada with his parents as Bosnian war refugees when he was 10.

“My film has elements of a thriller or shock horror, but really, it’s a genre mash,” he says.

Ruba Nadda says it’s not easy figuring out where to draw the line between genre and auteur, between the endless quest to haul in a big-name U.S. star and the creative urge to follow your muse, or between the risky prospect of self-financing and public funding.

“I think you just have to focus on telling an interesting story and hope it connects,” says Nadda, who earned great reviews across the board for her previous feature, Cairo Time, starring Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig.

Nadda returns to TIFF this year with Inescapable starring Siddig, Marisa Tomei and Josh Jackson, and she says the expectations are higher than ever.

“Alexander is such a great actor… but he was a tough sell. And I get it. If you’re spending all this money to make a movie, you want it to reach an audience. It has to have legs in the U.S.”

Nadda says she isn’t complaining. “I still feel like I won the lottery. Before we moved here, I was stuck in Damascus and I was betrothed to my cousin.”

The only thing she really misses is a sense of a larger community. “I never felt like I belonged to the local community in Toronto. I don’t know if I feel like I belong anywhere.”

Sweeney agrees, and says it’s not like it used to be — even a decade ago.

“You really felt a sense of community then. Things happened on a smaller scale and you felt a part of something,” he says.

These days, it’s all about making the sale to the U.S.

Certainly, that seems to be the gist of the official agenda propagated by Telefilm Canada — the largest public funding agency for Canadian cinema. Executive director Carolle Brabant recently had the agency put out a press release boasting a 157 per cent increase in U.S. sales of Telefilm-funded product over a five-year period (2006-2010).

“Digital platforms have increased our ability to reach American audiences, allowing our films to be discovered and enjoyed by an increasing number of viewers. However this digital platform access complements the fact that a number of our films — such as Cairo Time and Take This Waltz — have enjoyed solid theatrical runs,” states Brabant.

“We are seeing an increasing number of film distributors in the US supporting our films providing a fertile field of reach for Canadian films.”

The numbers look good, but they do not tell the whole story. Telefilm used to measure Canadian success by box-office share, but scrapped that metric earlier this year on the grounds that it was outdated.

Regardless of any data or system of measurement, the fact remains: It’s hard to make a movie in Canada – just as it is elsewhere in the world, which is why Vancouver International Film Festival programmer Terry McAvoy says he doesn’t blame any filmmaker for adopting genre elements, whether it’s Brandon Cronenberg taking on the monstrous mantle of his father David in Antiviral, or even a veteran such as Deepa Mehta taking on Salman Rushdie’s epic bestseller Midnight’s Children.

“It’s hugely competitive out there,” says McAvoy, who received hundreds of submissions for a handful of slots. “You can’t blame someone for wanting to make a living.”

And for those seeking a little solace in dysfunctional sex? Not to worry. This year’s TIFF also features new work from Sean Garrity called My Awkward Sexual Adventure, about an accountant seeking to win back his sexually dissatisfied squeeze with help from strippers. Now that sounds like a Canadian film — for changing times.

The Toronto International Film Festival runs September 6-16.

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.